


True North

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Dubious Morality, Fusco is Slightly Magical and Annoyed About It AU, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 01:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19052626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: Lionel Fusco has a moral compass. But, like, an actual one. He keeps it in his pocket and sometimes he argues with it.





	True North

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).



> <3 <3 <3

He inherits the compass from his grandmother.

This is when he is very young and she is very old: a kindly, shriveled mummy swaying in her chair by the cracked window, an over-plump, half-frightened child sitting dutifully at her feet. That’s how they are when she holds the compass out to him, a disc of battered, dented brass in her papery, wrinkled hand.

It becomes shiny, brand new under his fingers.

“Oh,  _ Ma _ ,” his mother says. “Did it have to go to Lionel?”

“It had to go to somebody,” his Nana answers, her voice still broad and flat and Bronx-y, even as she’s become so thin. “Might as well be him. He’s got a good heart, this boy. It might not be too much of a bother for him.” She punctuates that by ruffling Lionel’s bright, sandy-red curls. He lets her. He’s been told. 

His mother sighs deep, resigned. “It just never seemed to make you happy, Ma.”

“ _ Happy _ ,” his Nana snorts, almost disgusted. “It’s not all about that. Look here, Lionel,” she says, tapping the glass with a yellowed fingernail. “You see this needle?”

He does. Lionel’s eight, and he knows what compasses are. There’s a kid in his class who’s a Boy Scout - though in what woods, Lionel’s not sure - and he showed off the little pocket knife he had with a compass embedded in the handle, surreptitious-like under the desk. The little needle on that one pointed north, like compasses are supposed to.

This one doesn’t point to anywhere in particular. It only spins, broad and lazy, back and forth, as though it’s looking for something.

“This is a special compass,” she tells him. “A family compass. My grandad gave it to me when I was small.  His grandad gave it to him. And he, if I remember right, killed a man for it when he was in the Merchant Navy, but that’s not important. What’s important is, this needle points to where you need to go. Not where’s easy. Not where’s safe. Not where’s  _ happy _ . But towards what’s right. You follow that needle, you’ll be a good man. Lead a good life. Not everybody gets that chance, to know what’s the right choice all the time.”

Lionel peers at the glass face, the spinning needle, the painstakingly painted directions. His heart is hammering and he’s not sure.

“And one day,” his Nana says, stroking his forehead with her thumb, “you’ll pass it on to your own grandkids.”

With that, she fishes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her cardigan, unceremoniously lights one. “Not for nothing,” she says, closing her eyes as she deflates back into her chair, a cloud of smoke pouring from between her chapped lips, “I’m kinda relieved to be rid of it.”

So that’s how he gets the compass.

 

* * *

 

Looking for a zip tie, he slides his hand into his jacket pocket, withdraws it with a muted hiss. The compass is hot, like he left it sitting out on sizzling asphalt for twelve hours. It’s like that, when it has something to tell him. When it's angry with him. When he’s not listening. 

It’s like that most of the time these days. 

It shouldn’t be in his jacket pocket at all. He never would have put it there himself. He has to have it on him - obviously, that’s one of the terms of this stupid-ass family curse - but usually he keeps it in his work bag so he’s not scalding himself all day. But he remembers now, with a sticky, faintly hungover balefulness, that on the way home from the bar last night, he and Stills were walking home side by side, shoulders bumping convivially. And Lionel was digging in his work bag, hunting for something - gum to freshen his breath maybe, or sunglasses for the fluorescent lights on the train ride home - and he found the compass instead. The needle was swiveling wildly, a black blur in the white face of the compass. It made an arc and it pointed everywhere, everywhere but at Stills, everywhere but at his best friend, at the man who had his arm slung across Lionel’s shoulder, whose hand would sometimes come to sit warm at the nape of Fusco’s neck.

Split second decision, but he threw the compass in a trash can as they passed it. Stupid move, he knows. 

Not to worry. It always finds its way back. 

Sometimes with a vengeance.

“Lionel,” Stills is saying, “you got all that?”

He startles, feels around until he finds the zip ties in the back pocket of his jeans. “Sorry, just looking for…” He holds up the zip ties like they’re a hall pass. “Say again?”

“Clean the shit out of your ears,” Stills says, pleasantly. “I said take this clown to Oyster Bay. Get rid of him.”

“Got it.” Lionel kneels down beside the clown in question, this lanky guy with salt and pepper hair and a face like a guy in a fuckin’...cologne ad. Strong, handsome features. Eyes like a sad dog. Knocked out cold. Lionel’s not sure where he came from, what he’s here for, just that this guy tried to pull a gun on Lionel’s friends, which is pretty fucking rude of him. Lionel yanks his arms behind his back, zip-ties him at the wrists. He paws through the guy’s pockets, on a hunt for ID, finds nothing but lint. Not sure if he’s relieved about that. Lionel was bracing himself to find a badge, to learn this guy was IAB or a fed. Finding nothing is stranger, worries him more.

“The hell does that matter?” Stills asks as he helps wrestle the guy into the car.

“Doesn’t.” For some reason, Lionel can’t quite make eye contact, so he stares down at the slack, sleepy face of the guy as he clutches him tight under the armpits. “I just like to know who I’m killing, is all.”

 

* * *

 

The guy’s trying to sweet talk him from the back seat. Lionel hates that. They try all kinds of ways to get him to pull the car over, let them go, look the other way and this kind of slimy, sick-sweet appeal to his better nature is the worst. 

It’s like the compass, but worse. At least the compass can’t help but be like that. These guys aren’t so sincere.

The guy’s telling Lionel about Lionel: that he’s not greedy, that he’s not just a guy who’s underpaid and angry and looking for a leg up. That he’s in this because he loves his friend, because he’s loyal, and that means he can be saved.

If Lionel were paying attention, he’d be feeling this sickening pull in his stomach, this feeling like he’s naked, like he can’t hide anything, like this guy’s staring directly into his brain. As it is, he’s distracted by what feels like a brand against his side, the compass burning through his jacket with a heat like he’s never experienced before.

Finally, Lionel can’t take it anymore, blindly grabs a wad of fast food wrappers from the passenger seat and seizes the compass, throws it onto the dashboard with a miserable cry. It feels as though it should melt the plastic, should sink into the dashboard and be embedded there forever. But of course, it’s not really hot. It only burns Lionel.

He exhales, shuddering with relief. Short lived, as it turns out. Only lasts as long as it takes for Lionel to cast a curious glance at the compass. 

The thing is glowing, faintly. Not shining in the sunshine blasting through the windshield but glowing, faintly, like bioluminescent algae in a nature documentary he’d watch with his kid. The needle, usually in flux, is quivering with the effort of pointing directly through the space between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. Directly at the guy in the back.

Under his breath, Lionel asks, “Don’t suppose murder’s actually the right call this time? Just this once?”

The needle makes one complete rotation before pointing back at the guy. For emphasis, he guesses.

It doesn’t usually do that. 

Usually, when he takes drives like this, the compass is all over the place, pointing at places where he can pull over, where he can make a U turn, where he can do anything other than the terrible thing he’s about to do. Like it’s pleading with him.

It almost never points like that, with that kind of certainty.

He’s almost positive it’s never glowed.

“What are you doing?” he whispers to it. “What the hell is your problem?”

The compass, somewhat predictably, doesn’t say shit. And it’s at this point he realizes that the guy in the back has a flash grenade. 

So that’s its own problem.

 

* * *

 

He’s lying face down on the asphalt, ribs bruised, face scraped, lungs wheezing, wondering how it’s possible that he’s still sucking oxygen. The guy - that crazy asshole with the cologne model face - has his back to him, walking off down the empty road like the accident never touched him. He has Lionel’s gun, or Lionel would shoot him. 

The compass lies within reach on the pavement, battered and blemished, its glass face badly cracked. Its needle is an arrow, pointing at the man’s retreating back.

“He just shot me,” Lionel whispers, voice breaking. “Whose side are you on?”

The man turns a little, cutting across a field. The compass needle twitches to the left, following his progress through the dry, rustling grass.  
  


* * *

 

He wishes he had anybody to ask about this. There was only his Nana, and she died not too long after she gave it to him.  _ The coward _ . He did his searching as a teenager, navigating the public library like a shitty, dumb jock Magellan. He tried again once the Internet became a thing. He’s Googled. He’s asked Jeeves about it. Nobody has a compass like his. 

And “moral compass” is, in retrospect, a pretty bad search term.

Point is, there’s no guidebook. There’s no tech support you can call when your magic compass goes fuckin’ loopy.

It was never like this before. Lionel spent his whole childhood following the stupid thing’s needle wherever it pointed, his whole teens doing everything he could to avoid following the needle, most of his adulthood trying to find a middle way, one where he’s not a snitch, not a snob, not a goody-fucking-two-shoes, but a good, decent, regular guy. A guy you could have a beer with.

If you ask the compass, he had  _ too many _ beers.

But he can’t knock those years. He found his career in those years. He had his kid. He made friends, lots of friends. Not a perfect life, not by any means, but a life he could be kinda proud of. 

And then…

And then.

He can't believe he was bad. He can't believe it of Stills either, or any of those things. He can let himself think self-serving, yeah. Weak, fragile, scraping by and pulling each other along in a world that won’t pay them their due. Not evil men, just survivors. That's as far as he'll go, consciously.

Unconsciously, he can tell something's not right. Lionel doesn’t need a compass to see that. But it told him, over and over again. No matter how many times he hid it away or left it behind or threw it in the trash, it told him. It knew what he wouldn’t let himself know.

He’s not surprised it was happy to see Stills go, to see Lionel slip away from HR with his tail tucked between his legs. He just didn’t expect it to pick this suit-wearing, close-talking, trigger-happy creep as his new boss. The needle on this goddamn compass follows him around like an excitable puppy, like a lovesick kid.  This guy. The one who shot Lionel, who killed Stills, who breaks the law left, right, and center. Lionel's no great judge of character; he expects to be taken in by height and a threatening air. The compass, on the other hand…

“I woulda thought,” Lionel hisses to it when it rotates suddenly to point behind him in the line for coffee and suddenly he knows, he just knows, “that of the two of us, you’d be the one who had your shit together.”

“Talking to yourself, Lionel?” the guy murmurs silkily in his ear. Lionel's not sure where he gets off, throwing his first name around like that.

He tightens his jaw. “I take good conversation where I can get it. Whaddaya want?”

“Information,” he says, tucking a folder into Lionel's unresisting fingers. “I need this record unsealed.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“What’s in it for you is that internal affairs never finds out about that body in the woods, killed with your gun.”

Silently, Lionel's grip tightens on the folder and he opens it up, flips through the contents.

“Have that for you first thing when I get in,” he says. “What do you do with all this stuff?

“You don’t have to worry about that, Lionel. Enjoy your coffee.”

And just as suddenly as he appeared, he’s gone. The compass’ needle loses interest in following him after he melts into the crowd, switches its efforts to pointing eagerly towards the file.

“You need to fuckin’...” Lionel murmurs as he adjusts his grip on the coffee, dutifully examines the folder, “...fuckin’ explain to me what’s good about any of this.”

He’s noticed that the compass doesn’t scald him anymore when he touches it.

 

* * *

 

He has a bullet embedded in his asscheek. It feels like a punchline, like a banana peel he’s been waiting to slip on his whole life. The kind of thing that happens to guys who need to be shamed.

He’s surprised he doesn’t feel worse about it.

Well, not  _ surprised _ . When you’re doped to the gills like he is right now, nothing feels really bad. It’s all sensuously floaty and too bright, even in the dimly lit hospital room. He tries to kick his legs, rub them decadently against the sheets, but he’s not really sure if he moves at all. And even if he can, he shouldn’t.

But there’s another thing too, making him feel all warm inside, something he hasn’t felt in a long time. It’s pride, he thinks. Pride in himself. Where does he get off, feeling like that?

Well, when you save a kid, when you take a bullet for a kid, maybe you get to feel that way about yourself. Maybe you get to be a little excited, that you cared about someone else that way, that you put your own life on the line to keep them safe. 

Maybe he earned it.

He could check if he earned it.

He’s aware, in a murky, doped-up kind of way, that there’s somebody else in the room. They don’t speak. They don’t move much. They lack the peppy, unfazed efficiency of the doctors and nurses who buzz in and out from time to time. This person sits in the corner, outside his line of sight, a flickering, gloomy shadow. 

“Hey,” he murmurs, muffled from lying on his stomach, from a dry mouth. “Make yourself useful, huh?”

A faint rustling. Could be surprise. Maybe they didn’t know he was awake. He tries to point to the bedside, barely moves his hand. “Get me that.”

Soft, curious footsteps. The shadow pulls away from the gloom, solidifies, becomes the guy he always knew it was. His pal in the suit. The guy approaches Lionel's bedside, picks up the object and peers at it curiously. “What is that, Lionel?”

“Compass.”

“What do you need a compass for?”

Lionel considers. “I got shot in the ass,” he says after a bit. “I’m pissing in a tube. I need direction.”

The guy in the suit lets out a soft huff of air that could, conceivably, be laughter. He sets the compass on the sheet next to Lionel's hand.

He reaches for it curiously, clumsily. His fingertips brush the side, find it’s room temperature, maybe colder. The needle floats in the guy in the suit’s direction, follows his shifting movements with an unhurried grace. It’s not asking Lionel to do anything, not really. It just wants him to pay attention to the guy.

The guy is fiddling with the stuff on his tray of untouched food, comes to crouch by Lionel's bedside with a glass of water, a bendy straw, a furrowed brow. “Drink this,” he says. His voice is impossibly soft. He also sounds like he’ll kick Lionel's ass if he doesn’t play along. Lionel isn't sure how he manages to do both of those at the same time.

When he presses the straw to Lionel's lips, he drinks. No arguments. 

Lionel didn’t realize until that moment how badly he wanted water.

The guy lets him drink his fill, puts the water back on the tray. “You’re keeping that?” he asks, pointing to the compass.

“Mhmm.” Lionel lets his fingers close over it. 

“If you want,” he says. The guy rests his hand on Lionel's back, a shy touch that slides down his spine and comes to rest on the small of his back. “Should sleep.”

“I’m on it,” Lionel murmurs. There’s light escaping between his fingers, a faint bioluminescent glow.

“I’m staying for a while,” the guy says, again in that very gentle tone that does not accept arguments.

As he’s slipping away, Lionel whispers, “Knock yourself out.”

All Lionel can be sure of is that he goes to sleep right after, and he doesn’t dream. When he wakes up, the guy is gone.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t have it, that whole awful week. It fell out of his pocket at some point. Maybe when Simmons hit him, he thinks. He doesn’t have it when he’s tied to that chair, weeping for his son’s life. He doesn’t have it when he’s at Carter’s funeral, pushing back against what feels like an explosion inside of him. He doesn’t have it when he’s hitting Simmons over and over again, but not killing him, not going that far, because that’s not what Carter would want.

It doesn’t matter. He dies in the hospital.

He doesn’t really think about the compass until he’s on the plane to Denver on Glasses’ orders and he realizes there’s a cool, familiar weight in his pocket.

“There you are,” he whispers, taking it out. “Took you long enough.”

The compass points straight ahead. 

On the ground, he rents a car and starts driving. Glasses told him where to go, generally, but Lionel doesn’t really need his instructions. He has the compass resting on his dashboard, guiding every jolt of the steering wheel.

It takes him to the roadhouse where John’s dad used to drink. It’s hard to imagine what that guy was like, exactly. A soldier, based on the old photos on the wall. That checks out. But he’s also the salt-of-the-earth type of guy who would come to a place like this to get wasted, and that’s harder to square with who John is. Maybe it’s just the suits, how they’ve become a part of who John is in his head. Hard to imagine who he is when he takes the suit off.

When he finally shows up at the roadhouse, he’s not wearing a suit, so Lionel gets to find out. Surly, is the answer. And heartbroken. He kicks out at every kind gesture, every attempt to guide him home. He says it wasn’t worth it to save Carter all those years ago because she wound up dead anyway. He says it wasn’t worth it to save Lionel at all.

It’s at that point he notices the compass’ slow, deliberate rotation between Reese and where Lionel's fist rests on the bar, clenched, white-knuckled, shivering.

Now that, Lionel thinks, is endorsement.

He has the decency to take John outside before he hits him. John’s surprised by it, but he has no right to be. He bobs and weaves, drunken and miserable, and he gives as good as he gets. But it’s carefully, deliberately no more than Lionel can handle.

In the drunk tank, after, Lionel nurses his own scrapes and cuts, lets John sleep fitfully with his head resting on Lionel's thigh. A little one-sided peace talk.

In the end, it’s not what brings him home, but it  _ feels  _ right.

 

* * *

 

He cranks the heat up higher as the car whips around the corner on the dark, snowy road. He hates this. He  _ hates  _ this. He wishes his lights could be brighter, his sirens could be louder. He wishes he was using his real GPS instead of a magic compass, but the compass is what brought him here and he’s not taking any chances. Not with Reese in the passenger seat.

Reese, who is very pale, very gut-shot, pokes at the compass on the dashboard. “It’s broken, Lionel,” he says, softly. “Magnetic north is that way.” He jerks his thumb vaguely out a window.

Of course he knows where magnetic north is. Of course he just knows that.

“It doesn’t point north,” Lionel says. “It points to you.”

John blinks at him sleepily.

“It’s an old…” Lionel hesitates. He hasn’t explained the compass to anybody in years, but what the hell. The guy’s bleeding on his upholstery. “It’s a family thing I inherited. It’s supposed to point you in the right direction, tell you what to do to be a good person. Used to point at all kinds of things, but ever since you showed up, it mostly follows you around.” He exhales. “I have a theory about that.”

John takes the compass from the dashboard, turns it curiously in his hands. It’s glowing a lot now, enough light to read by. “Uh huh?”

“I spent a good chunk of my life ignoring that thing, because it was hard to do what it wanted from me. I just wanted to look after the people I loved and after a while it stopped being about...about what was right and just became about protecting people who didn’t deserve it. Who weren’t worth that. Who needed to be stopped. And I really, really had myself fooled. I could tell myself we weren’t bad people, that we were just guys making hard choices about what had to be done to get by. I  _ believed  _ that. I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten out of that on my own. And then, uh, you showed up.”

He sneaks a glance at John, finds him watching intently, cheek smushed against the headrest, and in a move that has nothing to do with anything except he kind of feels like he needs to, Fusco reaches out and pushes his hair back from his sweaty brow.

Eyes back on the road. “I kinda think you might’ve been the nuclear option, you know? If I won’t straighten up and fly right, if I won’t get my shit together, then let’s...let’s bring in the big guns. I think that’s you. And I’m grateful for it. I really am.”

For a long moment, the inside of the car is silent, punctuated by John’s labored breaths. “Well, Lionel,” he says at last, “I always knew you had a moral c-”

“If you finish that sentence,” Lionel interrupts gently, “I’m gonna punch you in the dick.”

John doesn’t finish the sentence. He just reaches for the steering wheel, rests his hand on it so their fingers are pressed together. A half-touch.

Not far to the hospital now.

 

* * *

 

When they go up to the roof, Lionel's a little thrown off. Between the clandestine trip upstairs to the solicitous way John’s acting, holding doors open for him and fussing over Lionel's shot arm, it’s hard to know what to expect.

Then he throws Lionel's phone off the roof and it’s business as usual.

“Lionel,” John asks over his protests, “do you have your compass with you?”

“Why? You gonna throw that off the roof too?” But his hand is already in his pocket.

“No.” John says. “I won’t.” When Lionel holds it out to him, John takes Lionel's hand in his own, cradling it,  so they’re holding the compass together.

It starts to glow like a tiny star.

“Why does it do that?” John asks.

“Dunno. Never used to before.”

“This thing always points you towards the right direction. The right decision. Could it do that for me?”

Lionel shakes his head. “Sorry, pal. Only works for me. But, uh,” he adds when John’s face falls by a tiny degree, “it’s overrated. I had this thing on me the whole time I was a dirtbag and it never made me do the right thing. You did that. So, uh, I figure if there’s a decision to be made, you’ll make the right call. I trust you.”

John pulls him in closer, holding him by the wrist. His eyes are soft and dark, shining in the light from the compass. “Lionel, I have to tell you something.”

Lionel tries to say “Spit it out, then,” but he can’t because John’s pressed so tight against him, because John’s lips are on his lips, because he forgot how to talk. Instead he leans in, pushes himself up on tiptoe to meet John, wrenches his hand out of his grip, drops the compass on the ground so he can hold him tight by the back of his head, fingers scratching at the nape of his neck in a way that makes him moan, soft and quavering.

After what feels like years, they break apart.

John looks sheepish, adjusts his jacket, takes it upon himself to readjust Lionel's sling too. “I really do have to tell you something,” he pants.

“Yeah, well,” Lionel says, faintly dazed, “in your own time.”

John does tell, but it takes a while.

 

* * *

 

Lionel isn't sure when it happens. He just knows that he turns out his pockets one day and the compass isn’t there. It’s not in any jacket or pair of pants he owns, not in any bag. He cleans out his whole car.

The compass is gone.

At first, he’s not surprised. He’s lost the damn thing before, after all. Could be that he dropped it somewhere, or left it behind in a bar or on a train. It’s just that it usually finds its way home after a while, and he’s not sure when he lost it, but he noticed an awful long time ago.

“I guess I’m relieved,” he says, staring up at the ceiling. “I never really wanted to give that thing to one of Lee’s kids. Assuming I live to meet Lee’s kids.”

John punches him in the shoulder. “No.”

“I mean, he’s young,” Lionel says as John shifts closer to him in bed. “If he waits as long as I did to have kids, I’m gonna be...well, old as hell. Not the kind of responsibility you want to dump on a baby, you know? Or anybody, really.” John nuzzles against his throat. “OK, I can think of one guy.”

John punches him again, in the side. It turns into a lazy, ticklish stroke across his stomach and up to his chest. “You miss it?” he asks.

Lionel thinks on that a while. “Kinda. I dunno, it was a thing to have in my pocket. Look at when I was worried. I guess I…” He’s thinking of all the time he must have spent without it, all the time he never thought to look for it. “I guess I don’t use it as much as I used to.”

John pushes him over onto his side, rolls him so his chest is pressed against Lionel's back. “I always thought you made the best choices when you weren’t looking at that thing.”

“Aw. Thanks.” He sighs, shifts to accommodate John. “I guess my main thing is, what if I have to find you someplace again? It was really handy for that.”

John holds onto him tight, presses his face into the top of Lionel's head so he can hear it all through him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he doesn’t.


End file.
